DMBeat it: Nancies goes for Mayer

Dave Matthews Band, Charlottesville's greatest contribution to pop culture, has grown so passé that an award-winning fan site has found a new object of its affection: John Mayer. So said Nancies.org earlier this week.

Mayer, a rising superstar whose chart-climbing single "Your Body Is A Wonderland" won the 2003 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, bears a striking musical resemblance to DMB.

Nancies explains the switcheroo. Mayer's "respect for his fanbase, tape-trading-based popularity, and bright future may seem familiar to Dave Matthews Band fans: it's exactly what Dave Matthews Band was like in the early 1990s, before they sold out."

"People are freaking out," says site co-creator Waldo Jaquith. "You should see the emails we've been getting. Half of them are hate mail saying, 'I hate you; I hope you die.' The other half are saying, 'Okay, I get the joke; now change it back.'"

The switch, indeed, was an April Fool's joke, and a well-orchestrated one at that.

By making previous arrangements with the operators of two real John Mayer fan sites, Jaquith was able to pull over lots of content– interviews, lyrics, and tour archives– about 300 web pages in all.

"We wanted people to poke through it and say, 'Oh, my God; it's real.'"

Besides bringing him about 250 emails between its midnight posting and 9am on April 1, Jaquith says the ruse had the added benefit of giving him enough downtime on the real nancies site to perform maintenance.

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In tangentially related news, The Hook column entitled DMBeat, a compendium of Dave Matthews Band news, has been retired, as its author, Bill Ramsey, recently climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and moved to Chattanooga.